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NASA To Rely On Space Companies

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The New York Times

Published: January 2, 2009

NASA has a flight gap coming. Can the private sector fill it?

The space agency is planning to retire the shuttle fleet in 2010, but the next generation of spacecraft is not likely to be ready to fly astronauts to the International Space Station and beyond until 2015. During the pause in American flights, the United States will rely on Russia to get astronauts to the station.

While NASA has been sliding toward the gap, a collection of companies known as the new space industry has been growing, but none is ready for the task of getting astronauts to the station.

The best-known company, Virgin Galactic, has been in the headlines for years thanks to its founder, Richard Branson. However, the craft it plans to use, called SpaceShipTwo, is designed to reach suborbital space in a simple up-and-down flight to give space tourists a spectacular view and a few minutes of weightlessness.

Other companies are pushing toward orbit, however, and have NASA's support.

NASA has jump-started two companies' plans to provide cargo services to the station with hundreds of millions of dollars in financing through its Commercial Orbital Transportation Services program. Last week, NASA announced that Space Exploration Technologies of Hawthorne, Calif., and Orbital Sciences of Dulles, Va., had won $3.5 billion in contracts to begin delivering cargo to the station by 2010.

NASA, however, has yet to finance an extension of the cargo contract to include human launchings.

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